Rubio ... took to the Fox & Friends couch to complain that liberals jumped to conclusions about the shooting before any of the facts were revealed.

“When this first came out, without knowing anything about the case, the first thing they started talking about was gun control, and gun control, ” the junior senator from Florida said. “I don’t hear anybody talking about bomb control. They put bombs, they left bombs behind on the scene of attack, intending to kill even more people than they did with the guns.”

Ignoring the fact that the San Bernardino bombs were not successfully deployed and that guns actually killed and injured people, does Rubio really want to argue that Democrats are indifferent to the threat from bombs?

I'd like to take Young Marco back to the mid-1990s, when a number of terrifying incidents -- the first attack on the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Olympic park bombing in Atlanta -- led to calls by President Bill Clinton and other Democrats for a requirement that traceable "taggants" be included in explosives. The NRA was having none of it, and therefore neither was the GOP:

President Clinton's attempt to pass an anti-terrorism bill ... ran into the brick wall of National Rifle Association opposition. The most desirable item in Mr. Clinton's proposal was a plan to make it easier to trace explosives by adding chemical markers known as taggants to black powder and gunpowder during their manufacture. The President, in deference to the powerful gun lobby, had already watered down his idea before it hit the House of Representatives. Then Republicans substituted a meaningless non-government study on the already exhaustively studied taggant issue.

The requirement never passed, and the NRA/GOP taggant blockade still hasn't been broken, as we were reminded after the Boston Marathon bombing:

One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

... a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told msnbc.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

Explosives manufacturers are required to place tracing elements known as identification taggants only in plastic explosives but not in gunpowder, thanks to lobbying efforts by the NRA and large gun manufacturing groups.

... In the past, the NRA has argued that taggants could affect the trajectory of bullets and would also be a de facto form of weapons registration....

But for the NRA-backed policy of not putting identifiers known as taggants in gunpowder, law enforcement could have quickly identified the explosives used to make the bombs, tracking them from manufacture to retail sale. That could well have saved the life of Sean Collier, the 26-year-old MIT police officer who was gunned down Thursday night by the fleeing bomb suspects.

If Marco Rubio is suddenly concerned about bombs, perhaps he'd like to announce his support for taggant legislation right now.

This is infuriating, that this is not more broadly known, and to shove it in Rubio's smug stupid face. "Democrats are soft on terorism!!" is something that needs to be killed and neutralized as the lie it is, on all fronts, because Republicans like Rubio and Cruz and a hundred others will shamelessly lie about it. Where the hell is our effective liberal Democratic rebuttal when these loons say such thing on the Sunday shows and elsewhere? Nowhere, because they're not invited on these Sunday shows, and the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are worse than fucking useless about this. The DNC ought to be raising HELL about the imbalance on these dumb Sunday talk shows- whose importance I can't fathom but they are still seemingly important.

I'm just tremendously sick that the Democratic Party is so spineless in fighting back against such incredibly arrogant and fantastical LIES by the GOP, that our mainstream media takes at face value and transmits. Why are we Democrats so cowardly, why do we not fight back, why don't we raise a stink about the HUGE bias of Beltway media towards Republicans? I truly do not get why our side aren't fighting for our ideals, our strengths, our real accomplishments. I don't know why the Democratic party has rolled over and died in dozens of state legislatures , governorships, without a fight. It is a tremendously dispiriting thing, when there is so much at stake and in the balance. I will vote for Hillary gladly, but who else have we got fighting for our side? While the Republicans have an army of horrible aggressive morons taking so much national media attention, where the hell are our emerging Democratic stars and personalities and politicians? We are seriously putting all our eggs in one basket with Hillary, and it bewilders me how it's come to this. Most Americans in polls agree massively with basic Democratic positions on a huge range of issues. Why then does this mean nothing? I am so exasperated. At the failure of our party to grow a generation of leaders spreading the Dem message and why it's good, to be in the media and on the talk shows batting down Republican craziness and nonsense. Where the hell are they? It's frightening what a void there is in major Democratic leadership on the national level. Anyone want President Trump? Carson, Cruz, Fiorina? They have the endless clown car, we only have Hillary. Who I support, but could have a stroke tomorrow and the Democratic Party is doomed because we have no backup. Sorry for the rant, but things are not good as they are, the DNC ought to get its useless act together. Fingers crossed for Hillary's election, the alternative is doom, Supreme Court appointments alone.

Beautiful, and a hundred percent right; I hope there are some operatives in the readership taking notes. I feel Belvoir's frustration and rage, but every time I think of Rubio I can't be so pessimistic. He is really the "please proceed" candidate, his lies so circumstantial, gratuitous, and precisely wrong, and he manages to believe in them so devoutly, and I hope he gets the nomination just so I can watch his simpering faux-enraged face crumple in debate. I wish he could debate Obama, but you can't have everything.